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Obama’s Census grab slipped in By Michael C. Guilmette Jr. Originally published on Feb. 12, 2009, in the Connersville News-Examiner. With President Obama’s stimulus bill juggernaut thundering through Congress, much of the focus in recent days has been on what has been snuck into the massive spending bill under the guise of stimulus.
These provisions, along with the truly colossal size of the spending plan, has kept the airwaves buzzing these last few days. But one of the potentially most damaging things snuck through in recent days is not even in the stimulus bill. Last week, the Obama administration pulled oversight of the 2010 U.S. Census away from the Commerce Department and into the White House itself. The Census, conducted every 10 years, is the only burden placed directly on the citizens of this country by the U.S. Constitution — to submit to be counted by the government. This count can and does have significant repercussions each time it is conducted since it determines the apportionment of representation — in other words, how many representatives each state has in Congress and, in turn, how many electoral votes each state can cast. The change came about ostensibly because of complaints by Congressional members that Sen. Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire who is Obama’s pick to head the Commerce Department, apparently could not be trusted to perform the head count properly. Gregg opposes using statistical sampling in the Census, preferring an actual count be performed. Supporters of sampling say counting all citizens is difficult due to uncooperative respondents, out-of-date records and the sheer number of people who are to be counted. Yes, counting more than 300 million people has its challenges, but that is why the Founding Fathers decided to conduct the count once a decade, and statistical sampling, while backed up my mathematics, still amounts to little more than guessing. Why is this important? The 2010 Census is projected to show a significant shift in demographics, and in turn, a significant change in Congressional apportionment. The Manassas, Va.,-based Election Data Services shows that 12 seats are likely to change hands between the states. Texas could be the biggest winner, adding four seats, followed by Arizona, which could add two. States standing to lose a seat include Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and New York. The differences between these states are black and white, or more to the point, red and blue. Early polling is already showing that Congressional Democrats are vulnerable to losing their majority in 2010, and a solid red state like Texas picking up four seats would certainly help that along. Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress are acting quickly to take advantage of their majorities, using the financial downturn to enact one of the largest encroachments on the private sector by the government since the New Deal. This is not surprising, since it was Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, himself who said they cannot let a good crisis go to waste. But it is already coming with a cost. Obama’s stratospheric approval rating he enjoyed early on has dwindled during his 23 days in office, and a small majority of Americans now oppose the pork-laden stimulus package and any further financial bailouts. However, Obama and his Democrat allies do not need to worry about approval ratings in the here and now, and they are moving to get their goals as entrenched as possible as soon as possible, before the public can get any the wiser. The move to draw the Census into the inner circles could well be an attempt to mitigate the fallout from when the public does catch on to what is happening. The Commerce Department is part of the executive branch and therefore part of Obama’s administration, but a separate department does afford the public some transparency in the process. Obama’s action, as well as deciding it will be Emanuel who will head up oversight of the Census, is troubling, since the administration still has not been satisfactorily transparent about Emanuel’s role in the Blagojevich scandal, instead decreeing that their own internal investigation was enough. The pending theft of the Minnesota Senate seat by Democrat Al Franken and the highly questionable 2004 Washington gubernatorial victory of Democrat Christine Gregoire shows the depths to which the Democrats are willing to sink to in order to get their hands on power, and the lack of elections stolen by Republicans shows the sanctity they place on the electoral process. More importantly, it shows the amount of trust — or lack of trust — the political class places on the American people. Obama may not be able to fend off the Democrats losing Congress in 2010 or his own defeat in 2012, but if he is successful at gaming the Census with this “pack the court” move, we may end up with an increasingly intrusive government and political system that favors the Democrats regardless of who is in power. If this happens, we will all be losers. • Guilmette is managing editor of the News-Examiner. He may be contacted at mguilmette@newsexaminer.com. |
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Copyright © 2009, Michael C. Guilmette Jr. |
While contraception funding was the epitome of special interest spending in the House bill, the Senate bill had, quietly slipped into its pages, provisions for a National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, a position that will establish a centralized government database of medical information on every citizen of the United States and will lay the groundwork for creating a government-rationed health care system.
